The Good Kinsman

In the Bronze Age Greek capital of Mycenae, the former outlaw known as Akhaïdes finds himself yet again at the center of a whirlwind of plotting and wrangling for power. When the king’s most trusted allies prove to be the most treacherous and love can no longer guarantee survival, only Akhaïdes has the knowledge, the persistence, and the cold precision needed to draw seemingly unrelated threads into explicable patterns, and take the actions that must be taken with no regard for his own expense or even his own life. Then he must set into motion a war that pits against each other the people he loves most.

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       The entrance to the kings’ tomb lay on Akhaïdes’ usual route to the stables. He did not always use the lioness gate; sometimes he went out the smaller northern one. This evening, having left Tisamenus as usual in the resolute custody of his own lawagetas, he left Mycenae by the northwest sally port and walked along the outer wall, through the warren of shacks and houses, the smells of cooking and refuse, the busy domestic bustle of a town preparing for supper, for leisure and for sleep. As always, everyone noticed him but no one looked. Their discretion matched his own absorption, allowing him the pleasure of observing them without the need for interchange.

It was perhaps this preoccupation that caused him to pause at the end of the tomb’s long dromos, and study the tall portal.

Houses were set back discretely here. No doors faced the dangerous passage, no yards used the approach to extend themselves. Only the backs of houses, windowless and still, added length to the passage. No one ever paused here. There was no one near.

All Orestes’ ceremonies were over. The doors stood vast and austere, painted in panels of white and green, seated in brawny stone cups, barred with bronze and a wooden beam too heavy for two men to lift, locked with a bronze chain and lead seal. They wouldn’t open again until another High King died.

Still Akhaïdes stopped there a moment, alone at the entrance to the passage, to consider Orestes. He had seen the man twice, and all his life. He would never be any closer to understanding him. He wondered for a moment what it would have been like to grow up in Mycenae, the High King’s eldest son – but no picture existed to show him something so strange. And had he done that, had he lived that way, he would have died the way they all died, years ago, and Tisamenus would be alone.

Orestes, he thought, would not have minded the way he had killed Quonwos, but Akhaïdes minded. It had been extravagantly excessive, many times more violent than necessary. And the kings and barons probably all thought that it had not been necessary at all. In fact, Akhaïdes agreed with that. He had deliberately provoked Quonwos into using his sword. Then he had killed him for it, to make a point. To explain himself. And because he could. But most of all, he had killed Quonwos to see what the others would do. Philaios had been the most interesting.

For all his overt malice, Quonwos could easily have been convinced to put the sword away, or to not have drawn it at all. He could have been won as an ally and might have had his uses. It was a waste, to kill someone potentially useful, however imperfect or wrong-headed. Well, it was too late for that.

Thinking quietly, he did not care that someone – several people – came walking by behind him. Then the feet stopped and he snapped awake.

Too late. Something flung over his head. He threw his right arm up, the left already raising the axe. But too late. It wrapped his head, his arms, ripped his legs from under him, dropped him on his face. A knee jammed into his back, a knife beside the knee – he felt it all the way in – and the net cranked even tighter around him. Too late.

A moment’s pause. Had he wanted to call, he couldn’t. The salty hemp was tight in his mouth and over his eye. He could not move at all. They lifted him all at once, like a load of fish, and bore him swiftly somewhere. He heard a ponderous rattle and groan, pant and clatter, the harsh creak of wood on stone. They heaved him away and he hit the ground hard. He tried to roll over but had forgotten the knife. He gasped as it slid grimly sideways. The net was so massive he could barely shift it.

A door thundered, rattled again and that was all.

***

He wriggled carefully, trying to force some space around him so he could start maneuvering out of the net. It clung like spiders’ legs, harsh and hairy, and it stank of fish and the sea. Every time he moved wrong, the knife in his back burned. He finally got his arms organized and himself roughly upright. Then he moved the rope away from his face.

He could not see. The darkness was pure, exactly the same with his eye open as with it shut, as with it covered, as with it blind.

His heart shivered. This was no different than the cell at Arne, he told himself. But it was different. The bond and chain of Arne had none of the finality of that sealed door. And he was too close to blindness now to tolerate such evocative darkness easily.

First the knife. He forced his arm through a square of net and groped for it, finally finding the shank. It had jammed against his belt and so entered only half its short length. But still it burned fiercely, and he had to wait a moment to steady himself before he could pull it out. He moved to toss it away, then changed his mind.

Working by touch alone he moved and shifted the net, gathering it here, spreading it there, struggling to imagine its shape and size and the distance to any edge, struggling to remember which segments he had already moved in which direction so he would not be there forever, like Sisyphus or Tantalus, endlessly tying himself tighter and tighter in the fibrous knots.

Finally it succumbed and the linen-bound edge slithered off him onto an unseen heap. Then he sat still, one hand pressed against the knife wound while blood leaked slowly through his fingers.

Blind. This was like being blind. He was familiar with perfect darkness, of course, but had not seen it in Mycenae. Now it reminded him far too much of the perfect darkness that already pursued him. It was exactly as if cold black fur were pressed over his eye. That sensation was so strong that he was shocked to lift his hand and find nothing there. He closed his eye; opened it. No difference.

The floor was cold, hard and dusty. Moving cautiously, conservatively, against the twinges of the knife wound, he dragged the net together into a heap to sit upon. The scratch and whisper of these movements echoed both nearby and from a vast distance. Abruptly he remembered this chamber: its irregular stone floor and curved walls, rising to the height of he didn’t know how many men; the crowded burial detritus in clay and wooden chests, bags and jars; the clutter of grave goods; the separate ossuary room at one side where the bones were laid, once time had bared them. He had not gone near the ossuary, but knew perfectly well there was no exit in that direction. There was no exit at all.

They had not killed him outright, probably so this could be kept secret. Had they killed him, they would have to be purified and everyone would see the evidence. Still, the knife, badly aimed as it was, was certainly meant to call death’s attention to him as quickly as possible. And they would not have put him here alive at all, if they had thought he might ever get out again.

He thought of rising, of fumbling his way across the crowded floor, of chipping foolishly with this little knife at doors as thick as the trunks of trees, of prowling – for hours or days – the walls and doors, seeking, against all information and intelligence, some way out of here. But there was no way out. It was cluttered, empty, dark as the finality of blindness, cold as any other tomb. And there was no way out.